Friday, January 04, 2008

BÏTCH, Welcome to America!

BÏTCH, Welcome to America!

Woman, immigrants, latinos... many groups at many times carry theweight of the system on their shoulders. The are promised rewards (for them, or perhaps their children) as long as they conform. What is the promise? Assimilation, acceptance and wealth.

This video-installation explores the mundane horror of a human being reduced to an "animal" through behavioral conditioning. There has been a lot of (in our opinion, not enough) resistance to it. Just as the current fashion holds that everything is "information", or the older philosophic fashion of "utility", Skinner's behaviorist regime only works if you throw away much of what makes us human.

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Ytaelena López, an artist and a chimera trained to live within chao

By Valentina Vitols

(...)

López also likes to play with the limits of the “politically correct” concept. She considers it a bet: she goes all the way with taking objects out of context, as much as art allows. “Galleries can be a safe haven for this, and, if someone doesn’t like it, at least it’s tolerated because it is in a gallery.” López says. It can also be dangerous; with "The Virtual Afterlife," an installation about gangs in her neighborhood, she feared for her safety. She wanted to photograph the street altars built in honor of violence victims, but got scared. She ended up—along the participating gallery—inviting people to write their condolences. More than 1,000 people got involved.

López relies strongly on installations. In preparation for these, she researches the community she will be working in. Usually, she selects a topic prompted by an impulse, harvesting ideas and concepts inside herself for several weeks or months. She gets as much information as she can from the web, from personal interviews, and statistic research. López is always hungry for understanding. She can’t stop at the “how,” and needs to step into the "why." “Maybe it's the nature of the topics that I pick: unfairness, paradoxes,” López says.